What do you guys use / recommend to set up your own VPN to access your LAN services remotely?

  • @[email protected]BEnglish
    47•1 year ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    CF CloudFlare
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    VPN Virtual Private Network
    VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

    4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.

    [Thread #6 for this sub, first seen 19th Jul 2023, 10:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • @[email protected]English
    14•1 year ago

    People seem to like and recommend Tailscale. I have not gotten to setting it up. My setup involves reverse proxy with treafik and my services in docker. Any suggestions on how what I need to do would be welcome.

    • @[email protected]English
      12•1 year ago

      This is the exact script I use to install tailscale on my VPN server

      Installing Tailscale

       curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh

      Enable IP forwarding

       echo 'net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf 
 echo 'net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding = 1' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf 
 sudo sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

      Advertise subenets and exit node

       tailscale up --advertise-exit-node --advertise-routes=192.168.0.0/24,192.168.2.0/28,192.168.5.0/24,192.168.10.0/24
      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 year ago

        Thank you for message, i appreciate the effort.

        Where I struggle is the part where i need to expose my subnet within Tailscale. I don’t have any machineip:port delegated to the services anymore.

        I got a domain name through CF, and have traefik generate unique url links as *service.mydomain.com that routes it to the specific service running in docker on my localmachine. It also takes care of certificates. Calling that service url only works within the local network.

        In my docker compose set up, I removed all the ports as I dont access the services via ip:port. I hope this makes sense to you.

        So it seems I need to configure Tailscale in such a way I can tunnel to my home network and then make the service.mydomain.com call. And that is where it got too complicated for me right now.

        I also fail to understand if I need to run Tailscale native or in (the same) docker env.

        • appelEnglish
          5•1 year ago

          You can run tailscale client on the host, not in a container. Then for the domain names, create a DNS record either in the public DNS (or I think you can do it in the internal tailscale DNS) that points a wildcard for your subdomains (*.domain.com) to the IP of the container host within the tailnet. Do “tailscale --status” on any device joined to the tailnet to see the IP addresses inside the tailnet. Then all of the devices will make their DNS request to either your upstream DNS or the internal one, they get the response back that they need to send their http request to the container host within the tailnet, it sends on the default 80 or 443 ports for http and https respectively, and then your reverse proxy handles the rest.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            hi, i finally found some time to dig into this. Oddly, I think I got a functioning setup, although it did a bit differently in the end. If you may, please advise if I indeed reached completion, or I have it set suboptimal.

            1. I installed Tailscale gui natively on my mac mini, and ios devices.
            2. I tried following up on your advise of creating DNS records. First in Cloudflare, but since I already set a wildcard entry as type CNAME/*/mydomain.com/DNSonly/TTLauto I wasn’t allowed to add type A record with a similar wildcard entry. I need this existing CNAME line for Traefik to work my SSL certificates (as far i understood). Then I tried setting it up through the DNS>custom Namespaces within Tailscale admin console instead. An entry would look like service.mydomain.com and for ipv4 the local ip of the mac mini. But I wasn’t sure about the config as it wasn’t working. Then i tried the Tailscale ip 100.xx.xx.xx, to no avail.
            3. I thought I needed to advertise routes for my local network, so I did. As similar to --advertise-routes=192.168.68.0/24. And later instead the docker network 172.23.0.0/16. Still didn’t do it.
            4. As I am a NextDNS user I set the ID number in Tailscale>DNS>Nameservers as the Global nameserver and checked Override local DNS.
            5. In the NextDNS config I defined a Rewrite function as *.mydomain.com to the Tailscale IP of the local machine 100.xx.xx.xx . And boom, I can access the servers from my idevices over the Tailscale vpn tunnel.
            6. I then tried to tear down the setup again. It seems the advertise routes from (3) doesn’t do anything, so I removed it again.

            Open for any suggestions on this hacked attempt.

            Update: yes found an issue. I can only access the services with tailscale enabled. I suspect the rewrite is causing an inproper pass through without the tunnel, as that the tailscale ip cannot be reached.

            Update 2: I changed to rewrite to the local ip address instead, similar to 192.168.68.110. I think it works now when accessing within the local network without tunnel and externally with the tunnel.

  • GiddyEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    i have pivpn (wireguard+pihole) running on a pi zero and it is rock solid

  • @[email protected]English
    5•1 year ago

    Was running Wireguard and am now in the process of changing over to Tailscale (Headscale).

    It uses Wireguard for the actual connections but manages all the wireguard configs for you.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•1 year ago

        Getting the configs to work with my personal devices was already a little finicky but doing that for not-so-technical family members was starting to be a bit too much work for me.

        I’m hoping that Headscale will cut that down to pointing their app at the server and having them enter their username and password.

        • @[email protected]English
          5•1 year ago

          I came here to say exactly this - WireGuard is great and easy to set up, but it gets harder as you add more people, especially less technical ones, as getting them to make keys and move them around etc becomes a headache. Tailscale also minimizes the role of the central server, so if your box goes down the VPN can still function. Tailscale can also do some neat stuff with DNS that’s pretty nifty.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•1 year ago

          One thing that helped a ton with that for Wireguard (for either you or anyone else reading this) is: You can generate QR codes for a peer’s full Wireguard config! So you can create the images on your computer and then a non-technical user can just scan the code to get configured.

  • varakiEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    I installed OpenWrt on my home router and set up wireguard on it. If you have dinamic IP address assigned by your ISP, like me, you also have to setup a dynamic dns updater on the router. I use duckdns.org. Then you have to open the port for wireguard on the router. Here’s a video guide on how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo2AsW4BMOo

  • @[email protected]English
    4•1 year ago

    PiVPN. single line install script. Couldn’t be easier. Now if you have a shitty ISP like yours truly that can prevent you from being able to.

  • HousePantherEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Check out Slack Nebula.I personally like it very much and used it to build a software-defined WAN to support my family’s needs. I use a point to point WireGuard tunnel between my VPS and my home network to support self-hosted instances of Mastodon and Lemmy.